Last week, at MongoDB London, I've seen one of the best presentations on the topic. Rob Hill, Head of Big Data for Financial Services at Capgemini, discussed the topic in details from a business and technical point of view. Value of the technology was also shown in the context of an internal Single View system currently being developed. Rob's domain knowledge is outstanding and having him at MongoDB London was a great privilege. Thanks!

Lecture starts with an overview of traditional architectures, then goes through the key challenges for SCV, why Big Data makes things even worse and then highlights why MongoDB is such a natural fit. Slides below are self-explanatory, but let me quote a few key passages.

The business reasons to start your projects today:

A customer data flaw in a demand forecasting system cost a major US airline $50 million in one year of operation…on top of the $40 million development cost to implement it

When a global stationary retailer examined their views of a customer, it was found that every real customer had roughly 2.5 “virtual” customer records across 75 source data systems. Resulting cost was estimated as a net loss of 9% per customer transaction

Jul 25, 2014

Every organization needs an healthy ecosystem to succeed. At MongoDB we are pretty serious on partnering and we've invested in building our network and enabling our partners and customers to be successful. We've been constantly growing and we now have more than 600 companies working with us to change the database landscape forever.

I see our ecosystem not just growing, but maturing as partners and clients are willing to build more and more solutions with MongoDB. Our partner program is maturing with them.

We've started our partner journey by hiring selected partners with whom we've built a trustful relationship and they've grown with us. We've then launched the first version of the partner program that served to pave the way to scale the quantity of partners and they joined. Later on we've introduced benefits and requirements to improve quality and partners stepped up their knowledge.

In this latest iteration we've launched a comprehensive set of benefits to increase the productivity of our ecosystem. We've introduces many things, but I'm particularly excited of the Technology and Service Certification Program and the Partner Development Subscription.

Technology Certification allows partners to reach out to the largest community in big data. Our community is massive with over 8 millions downloads (and counting) and hundreds of thousands of deployments at scale. Each of them needs to work with proven technologies. Enterprises want to reduce risk and need to have fully supported solutions. Clients want to be reassured that integrations have been made according to best practices and tested. Certify your solution!

Services Certification means being different. The world out there is competitive and customers struggle to find good partners to build, integrate and manage their solutions. Being certified proves that your delivery team knows the technology inside out. Get certified!

Partner Development Subscription reduces risks, improves time to market and helps launch new solutions. We've launched this special offering to assist partners in building, testing, and optimizing their integration or solutions offerings on an unlimited number of servers. Partners get access to a Market Development Fund that can be used in co-marketing your MongoDB-based solution. Learn more.

Facebook posted on their walls the phrase "this journey is one percent finished". We want to build the largest and most productive ecosystem in the software world and our journey has just begun.

Dec 30, 2013

It's again that time of the year. Analysts are spending oceans of words to predict the future, companies are making plans for the next year and people are resting and enjoying the break with their families. To me, this is the perfect time to reflect on my choices, the direction I'm headed to and consider if I still love what I do.

At the beginning of the year I decided to join MongoDB (formerly 10gen). The more I think about it, the more I realize I've been wrong. Yes, it's been the worst decision in my life not to join MongoDB when I was first offered the opportunity years ago. At that time an insightful friend asked me to consider the opportunity. At that time I didn't see what I see today.

I didn't see the database world changing so quickly. I didn't see lots of new applications being built on MongoDB and an ecosystem growing around the product. I couldn't glimpse the future of it becoming the leading NoSQL database. I couldn't understand the opportunity for Document Databases and for JSON emerging as a new standard for developers... or maybe I just preferred stability over challenge.

Time has passed since then and now I'm here. How was 2013 at MongoDB? Just amazing. As a good scribe I want to capture the key developments in the MongoDB world in a single page. This is an exercise that I'm doing since years and it gives an idea of the pace of growth, how well we communicate and the level of engagement of the ecosystem.

Nov 29, 2013

Our American friends are celebrating thanksgiving and, even if I'm not, I'd like to spend a few lines to say thank you to the amazing MongoDB ecosystem.

November has been a great month. This week we've been invited by Xpand-it to a great event in Lisbon and by Jaspersoft to their JasperDirections conference in Milan. SPP42 recently hosted a MongoDB conference in Ankara and we're platinum sponsors at Codemotion Milan with Byte-code. We've also co-sponsored a Big Data conference in Israel with Trainologic.
Partners are reaching out to us with greenfield opportunities and making MongoDB the core of their business.

This is what happens each and every month when you have such great allies!

We perceive your energy, commitment and passion and rest assured that we're here to support you. To that end, we've launched the project referral form. Do you want to work with a MongoDB expert to help your customers adopt our technology? Fill the questionnaire appropriately and we'll cooperate with you on the opportunity.

Oct 8, 2013

Last week was intense and productive. I've had the pleasure to attend the Red Hat Partner Conference in Madrid and to speak at the Pentaho Partner Summit in Sintra. I've learned a lot of lessons, but the most important one is that an ecosystem always wins.

The world of technology is built on interactions. Interactions between customers and partners. Synergies amongst different species of partners. Even competitors are interacting with each other and the term "coopetition" has been coined to explain new and complex relationships.
The very foundation of IT is intercommunication. Systems Integrators are connecting disparate sources. Technology companies are investing in certification and integrated systems to make it easier for tools to cooperate. Cloud vendors are promising to hide the complexity behind and simplify how we interact with solutions. Channel partners are integrating different products as part of their portfolio to simplify provisioning.

I'm convinced that to win in the long run we need to build the greatest and most productive ecosystem ever. It should be easy and rewarding to do business with us. Each and every MongoDB partner we onboard should share our vision and be part of a global community. Customers working with our ecosystem should feel the difference. Ultimately, these alliances will contribute to our bottom line and make a difference.